


Pure White Vision of Paradise

by LadySage



Series: Floorstuck [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Floorstuck, Gen, Snow and Ice, Snowball Fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-12
Updated: 2011-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-24 13:13:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadySage/pseuds/LadySage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade Harley, having grown up on an island in the Pacific, has never seen snow.  When the first snow of winter comes, she is thrilled, only to be disappointed when reality doesn't quite match with her expectations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pure White Vision of Paradise

“YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

Jade’s shriek shattered the morning quiet of the floor.  In every room, sleepy residents raised their heads in puzzlement and covered their heads with their pillows, hoping to catch a few more precious moments of sleep before they had to wake up for morning classes.

Except for Jade, who thrust open the doors of her wardrobe and began pulling out items in an excitement that neared frenzy.

Down coat.  Scarf.  Mittens.  Knit cap.  Boots.

College had brought a wealth of new experiences to Jade’s life, both good and bad.  Making friends face-to-face.  Meeting trolls.  Driving on public roads.  Going to class and functioning on a set schedule.  Dining halls. Sports games.  Most of them were things that other people her age took for granted, but she’d never experienced in her isolated island upbringing.

But out of everything, expected and unexpected, there was one thing she anticipated more than anything else.  They told her not to get her hopes up, that it wasn’t guaranteed in the Pacific Northwest.  She didn’t listen to the naysayers, and now her dreams were coming true.

 _Snow_.

She scampered down the hall and down the stairs, her head filled with visions of snowmen and sledding, ice skating and snowball fights.  It would be a winter wonderland akin to what she saw on the stop-motion Christmas specials she grew up watching.

She kicked the door open.  Using hands takes too long and is for suckers.

She ran outside and was greeted by…

…Cold, wet concrete and chilly-looking students trudging to class.  Jackets and sweaters without a hint of down, tennis shoes instead of boots, and only a smattering of gloves, hats, or scarves.  Small white flakes that melted before they even touched the ground.  Nothing resembling the pure white vision of paradise her mind had conjured up.

Suddenly Jade felt a little stupid and very overdressed.  Around her, the few students who were up at this hour plodded past, their faces pointed downwards to avoid getting snow in their faces.  Tears sprang to Jade’s eyes, stinging in the cold. 

Instead of following suit and looking down, however, Jade looked up.  She watched the snow swirl and eddy, almost invisible against the pastel grey of the cloud cover.  She tried to pick out individual flakes, to follow them until they reached the ground, but their paths seemed so random and they were impossible to differentiate…not the six-pointed, star shaped wonders like in the cartoons.  She considered twirling around slowly, like in her Japanese mangas, but her sense got the better of her.  Still, she raised her arms slightly, putting out her hands to catch the snow.

“Hey Jade!”

An amiable voice startled her out of her reverie.  She looked toward the sound, but the snow that had melted on her glasses made it hard to see.  “Hi!” she replied to the tall, semi-rectangular shape topped off with black, forcing herself to sound cheery.  She pulled off her glasses and wiped them on her coat, then pushed them back on her face.  The blob had been replaced with one John Egbert.

His gangly frame shook slightly in the cold – his cotton pajama pants clearly did little to protect him.  “So, this is your first snow, right?”

“Oh, ah, yeah.”  She sniffled.  “Not quite what I was expecting, though…”  Her vision was getting blurry again, but it wasn’t from wet glasses this time.  Fuck.  She hated it when she got like this.

“Haha, well, I guess snow in Washington is never really a given…” John said, as oblivious as usual.  Only after an extended pause did he catch on to her emotional state.

“Oh no!  Jade!  What’s wrong?”  He sounded alarmed.  Jade wanted to stop and laugh and reassure him that she was fine.  But no.  She couldn’t stop crying.  She buried her face in her mittens.  She wanted to hide away from the world.  She wished she could melt into the sidewalk as well.

“Are you homesick?  Do you miss Bec?”  She shook her head.  “Is it about a boy?”  She shook her head again, inwardly marveling at his stupidity.  “Is it about the snow?”  She tried to shake her head again, but could only cry harder.

“Awww, Jade…”  He awkwardly patted her back, trying to be comforting.  “I mean, it could stick this year!  It’s pretty early for snow so if it just gets a little colder, we should get some.  Maybe enough for sledding!  And I can teach you to make snowmen…”

Jade looked up, smiling through the tears.  “You need to be taught to make snowmen?”

“Oh yeah, it’s waaaaaay harder than it looks.  But it’s okay, you’ll be able to do it in no time, especially with me teaching you!  I am the snowman-building _master_.”

This time she laughed.  “Great, I’m all set then!  I can’t wait until it gets cold enough for the snow to stick.  Hmm, I never thought I’d say ‘I can’t wait until it gets cold’…”

John chuckled.  “Don’t worry, I bet in a few months you’ll be back to ‘I can’t wait until it gets warm’!  Actually,” he added as his teeth started to chatter audibly, “we should probably go inside where it’s warm.  I bet Nepeta’s made that tea that you guys drink every morning…”

Together, they walked up to the steps leading to the entryway.  John swiped his ID through the card reader, and the door unlocked with a click.  He let her walk through first and when he entered, shutting the door behind him, she pounced, wrapping him in a tight hug.

 

 

The weeks came and went, as did the snowfalls, but none yielded more than a thin dusting that melted after an hour or two.  Jade’s hope began to wane as winter break drew closer and closer and the temperature continued to hover around freezing.  She ceased to leap to the window every morning and joined the ranks of those who trudged to class with faces downturned.  She could see now that the snow was a lie.

It was her phone that woke her up.  Instead of the usual Squiddles theme song that she used as her alarm, it was the dog barking sound effect that she used as a text message.  She ignored it and rolled over, trying to get back to sleep.  It was late for her, but she had been up most of the night in the physics lab and didn’t want to get up.  All she wanted to do was sleep the day away…

Her phone barked again.  And again.  And again.  The fifth time, Jade shot up and grabbed her phone off her desk.  She made as if to hurl it against the wall, but thought better of it – checking her messages seemed like a better use of the device.   She put on her glasses – she was totally blind without them, and pulled up her inbox.  The first was from John:  “jade!!  we’re getting lunch, come meet us downstairs”

There were messages from Rose, Dave, and Feferi, all along the same lines.  The last one, which was from Karkat, made her smile: “GET YOUR ASS OUT HERE BEFORE WE FREEZE OUR BULGES OFF, LAZYASS.”

So she rose.  Jean skirt, long-sleeved shirt, school hoodie, tennis shoes.  She dragged a brush through her bedraggled hair, a toothbrush through her mouth. When she felt a little human, she headed down the stairs to meet her friends. 

Jade opened the door, and was greeted by a blast of cold air.  Waiting there was about half the floor; behind them, an endless field of white.

Her hands flew to her mouth.  The sky was clear and burned an intense, icy blue like she had never seen before.  The light reflected off the snow, so bright that it hurt to look at, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away anyway.

This was it.  This was the dream.  It was everything she hoped for and more.

She just hadn’t expected it to be so cold…

Kanaya walked up, holding Jade’s coat.  “I’m sorry to have purloined this, but judging from your recent behavior I presumed that you would have neglected to wear this out of the room and that would likely have resulted in you catching a cold…”

“Thank you, Kanaya,” Jade giggled, pulling it on.  “You take such good care of me!”  She braced herself against a railing as she traded her tennis shoes for the boots her roommate handed her.  The cold penetrated her skirt easily, leaving her with a wet, slightly numb line across her butt.

Rose walked up, holding a fuzzy green bundle.  “Kanaya and I made these for you.  Consider them a late birthday present or an early Christmas present.”

Jade examined the mass of fabric, finding it to be made up of hand-knit mittens, a hat, and a scarf, all matching.  “Oh my god, you guys are too amazing!  I can’t believe it!”  She added the hat and mittens, and tossed the scarf on just as she had seen people do it in movies.

Rose smirked slightly.  “Wear it like that, and it’ll slide right off.  Here, try it like this…”  She reached up and adjusted the scarf, tugging at the long swath of fabric until it was snug around Jade’s neck.  “Good, it matches your eyes better than I could have hoped.  Kanaya dyed the yarn herself,” she added, nodding to Jade’s roommate.

It was just too much.  Left speechless, the only course of action Jade could think of was to tackle-hug Rose, knocking her into the snow.  Kanaya received a much gentler embrace.

She turned to the rest, about to suggest the move on to the food court, when she felt an impact.  Cold bloomed across her chest.

“Wow, right in the tits.  Nice one, John.”

“What?  No!  Jade, I promise I didn’t mean to!”

“Dave!  John!”  Rose managed to make just their names sound like a chastisement.

Jade dropped to her knees, gathering the snow together in front of her.  She tried to form it into a ball, but it just stuck to her mittens and fell apart.  Rose knelt next to her, showing her how to cup the snow and pack it together.  Around them, more snowballs fell.

Luckily, Aradia had their backs.  With remarkable efficiency, she produced several snowballs and whipped them at the human boys.  Jade could hear John’s cries of laughter and Dave’s curses.

It was on.  They ended up splitting into two teams, boys vs. girls: Rose, Jade, Aradia, Feferi, Kanaya, Vriska, Nepeta, and Terezi against John, Dave, Karkat, Tavros, and Gamzee.  When the boys protested about the uneven numbers, the girls cited their natural disadvantage in strength. (“Bullshit,” Dave grumbled, “if the trolls had a battle of the sexes, there wouldn’t be a single fucking survivor.”)

Not that it made much difference.  Karkat tried his best to rally his troops, but the complete lack of strategy or even giving a shit immediately became clear.  It was pure chaos.  Vriska continually pelted Tavros with snowballs until he was unable to do anything but get hit.  Terezi made a few attempts at throwing, but they missed wildly, and contented herself with eating the “sugary” snow.  John was the only really effective member of the boys’ team – he was clearly as experienced with snow as he claimed.  But Rose, native of snowy upstate New York, was his equal or better in snow-based combat, and Aradia and Feferi, also local, were not far behind.

All the while, Jade was trying to put together a decent snowball, without success.  Try as she might to follow Rose’s instructions, the powder just stuck to her mittens instead of to itself.  Even when she did get enough together to throw, it always disintegrated before it hit its mark.

She didn’t care much, though.  She was in the snow, playing with her friends, and that was what mattered!  There would be plenty of time to learn to perfect the art of making snowballs and snowmen.  And when she did…

Her thought was interrupted by a snowball to the side of her head.  She looked up sharply and saw Dave pull his fist back in a subtle victory gesture.

“DAAAAAAAAAAAVE!” she shouted.  She gathered up a fistful of snow, once again, but instead of throwing it, she simply ran up and stuffed it down the back of his shirt.  Not even he was able to keep calm – he yelped and leapt away.

Jade grinned.  She had discovered a new strategy.

There was no clear winning side to the fight.  Both sides fought with valor, but by the time they finished, they were all thoroughly coated with a fine white powder and breathing hard.  Dark clouds were starting to gather overhead again.  It was agreed upon that the best course of action would be to head to the commons, get something warm to eat, and leave puddles all over the floor for Slick to mop up.

 

 

When they returned, bellies full of warm food and hot chocolate, it was snowing again.  Fat white flakes that resembled nothing so much as bits of foam and cotton fluff drifted lazily to the ground.  It had already softened the edges of the footprints and trenches leftover from their epic battle; soon, the evidence would be erased entirely.

Rose swiped her keycard and held the door open as the shivering residents straggled inside.  Jade hesitated, and waved for Rose to close the door.  “I’ll catch up in a few minutes, Rose!  You can go on in!”

Rose hesitated.  “Will you be warm enough?   I know snow is exciting at first, but…”

“Don’t worry!” Jade tugged at the ends of her scarf.  “With my fancy new winter accessories, I’ll be toasty warm!  And anyway, I won’t be long.”

Rose smiled and nodded, and walked inside.  Jade was alone now.  Once again, she looked upward at the snow, but this time she smiled.  Slowly, slowly, she put out her mitten-clad hands and twirled.

Her first real snowfall.


End file.
